Sara Feldman

Sara Feldman

Preceptor in Yiddish

Before arriving at Harvard in 2018, Sara Feldman was a Hebrew and Yiddish Lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Frankel Institute Fellow at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She received her doctorate in Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan in 2014 with a dissertation entitled, “Fine Lines: Hebrew and Yiddish Translations of Alexander Pushkin’s Verse Novel Eugene Onegin, 1899-1937.” Her primary scholarly focus is on the interplay between Yiddish, Russian, and Hebrew language and literature in modern, secularizing Jewish culture. She is engaged, as a researcher and sometimes a participant, with other forms of contemporary Jewish culture including film and television, theater, and tango, especially as they relate to queer and gender studies, multilingualism, ex-Orthodoxy, and migration.

Dr. Feldman teaches all levels of Yiddish at Harvard, from elementary to advanced, as well as Yiddish film. She is committed to practicing a communicative language pedagogy that cultivates not only literacy, but also fluency in Yiddish as a spoken language.